Arturo met my eyes, and he nodded. I thought…maybe he respected that answer. At the very least he accepted it.
“What about you?” I asked. “Why are you here?”
“I was ordered to be here,” he said.
“You were not-ordered,” I said.
“Right, but Jorgen is my flightleader and I followed him.”
The way I remembered it, the rest of them dragged Jorgen along until he caught up to the idea.
“So you disagree, then. You don’t think you should have come.”
Arturo hesitated. Maybe he was worried about expressing disagreement with his superior, but he seemed to have a more familiar relationship with Jorgen. I thought there was more to it.
“Do you wish you were back on Detritus?” I asked. “Helping your people to broker a peace deal?”
He was quiet for a moment, staring out the window into the miasma. “No,” he admitted. “I think we’re doing the right thing, helping you.”
I nodded. “Yes. You are.”
“Maybe not the smart thing,” he said. “I worry we’ve chosen the losing side on both your planet and mine, and I’m afraid that this is going to go terribly wrong for all of us. But I don’t like the idea of bargaining with the people who’ve been murdering us for generations. I don’t like the idea of peace talks with the beings who’ve been keeping us in a cage.”
I smiled. He understood then. “Giving in to them feels like deciding to die slowly.”
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “But you’re right that it feels like admitting we’re lesser. Like we’re saying we deserved the way they treated us, and we’re willing to simply forgive and forget.”
“The Superiority likes that idea,” I said, “so long as we’re always the ones doing the forgetting.”
Arturo nodded, staring out at the miasma again. I liked the way he thought about things. The fact that he did think about them, while so many people on both his planet and mine were willing to swallow the easy story without worrying about whether it was a true one.
“Did you choose to be a pilot?” I asked. “Your people are at war, but you can’t all be fighters.”
“No,” Arturo said. “They say we’re all part of the war effort no matter our job, and maybe that’s true in a way. But being a pilot gets you a lot of respect. A lot of disadvantaged people want to pass the pilot’s test for the opportunities it affords them, but for me it was expected. My parents have a lot of connections, a lot of…social power, I guess. And to maintain the empire, I had to be a pilot.”
“That makes sense,” I said. “You have to prove you are the best.”
“They didn’t want me to stay and prove it,” Arturo said. “I nearly got killed when I was a cadet. My parents pulled strings, got me my pin early so I wouldn’t have to keep flying.”
“But you are flying.”
“Yeah,” Arturo said. “My parents weren’t happy about it. Neither was my girlfriend. They all felt like I’d done my part. But I hadn’t, you know? I hated the thought of slinking back to the caverns and benefiting from the deaths of my friends, people I knew and liked. It felt like cowardice, hiding when I should be out there fighting.” He shook his head.
“Is that why your…” Jorgen didn’t like it when I used this word. “I don’t think there’s an exact translation for it in my language, but your mate—”
“My girlfriend,” Arturo said. “Yeah, that’s why she broke up with me ultimately. I think she wanted to for a while, but didn’t feel like she could. Like, it doesn’t feel good to give up on someone who’s fighting for the future of humanity, but she’d always thought I was going to come back a few months after flight school. And then I didn’t.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay. I think we’re both better off, honestly. She said I’d changed, that I didn’t care about the things I used to.” He shrugged. “She was probably right.”
Given how deeply he seemed to care about his people’s freedom now, I thought that could only be a good thing, but I wondered if he would agree.
“We’re on the same side,” I said. “As long as you want to fight the Superiority, you don’t have to worry about me.”
“Same to you,” he said. “Jorgen gets hung up on rules, but he doesn’t want to play nice with them any more than you and I do.”